Prof. Monia Acciari, Dr Vishal Chauhan, Dr Souraj Dutta
To outline the approach taken in planning this presentation, the panel draws on the participants’ respective research interests, methodological frameworks, and current or emerging projects. This approach is intended to demonstrate how Digital Humanities are influencing, and may continue to influence, research practices, the formulation of research questions, and the interpretation of findings, while also prompting further lines of inquiry. Central to the panel was the examination of the role of data, particularly the ways in which data diversity can generate additional data, thereby open new research pathways and yielding unanticipated insights.
Dr Vishal Chauhan’s talk (Doing Digital Humanities: Potential and Challenges for Media and Cultural Studies) discussed the potential of Digital Humanities for Media and Cultural Studies, along with its challenges and caveats. He looked at framing Digital Humanities (DH)not as a discipline, but as an ever-evolving assemblage of methods, theories, and infrastructures that bring computational knowledge and technologies into humanistic inquiry.Digital Humanities scholarship uses digital tools to study the humanities and culture, while simultaneously interrogating digital mediation itself. It is not simply about doing humanities with computers, but about examining and critiquing computation and the digital by asking how mediation through interfaces, databases, and algorithms reorganises and hierarchises evidence, voices, and interpretations.
Dr Chauhan suggested that the Digital Humanities (DH) should be understood as a critical methodological approach rather than a technical shortcut to research outcomes. It does not replace intellectual labour, interpretation, or theoretical engagement; instead, it extends the humanities' analytical capacities under digital conditions. Theory must guide the choice and use of digital tools, ensuring that methods are aligned with research questions grounded in cultural, historical, and political contexts. Without theoretical anchoring, digital tools risk producing descriptive patterns devoid of meaning. When used reflexively, DH enables scholars to ask more incisive cultural questions—about power, representation, exclusion, and mediation—by combining scale with critique and infrastructure with interpretation.
Building on this, Dr Souraj Dutta’s talk (An Imaginary Media Machine for an Imaginary Archive) presented an overview of the arguments advanced in his PhD thesis in favour of adopting Digital Humanities methodologies to analyse popular Bollywood films. Dr Dutta took as his subject a crop of postmillennial mainstream Bollywood films produced between 2003 and 2019 and explored participation and meaning making when audiences are faced with densely intertextual filmic texts. His inquiry into the production and consumption of films under the conditions of digitality bypassed more common quantitative and toolkit-oriented approaches often seen in Digital Humanities projects in favour of a more speculative methodology associated with specific strands of media research. Dr Dutta outlined how the prevalence of intertextual references in these films construct an imaginary archive of past Hindi films – a corpus that exists not in physical or computational space, but in the minds of the moviegoer.
The panel concluded with Dr Acciari’s intervention on the idea of the archive, supported by participatory methods and geolocalization. Introducing the AHRC heritage film project Creative Archives: Producing, Preserving and Showcasing Transnational Indian Film Heritage, the talk narrated the project’s transformation from a purely engagement focused initiative into a broader research endeavour. By adopting Digital Humanities approaches, the project opened-up possibilities for historiographic exploration that might otherwise remain unobserved, with civic participation becoming a central element. The talk unpacked the project’s early stages, its transformational trajectory, and the aspirational development of PPAIC (Project People Archive of Indian Cinema – PPAIC.info), in which material culture and personal histories become central to imagining a more democratic approach to film heritage. Dr Acciari’s intervention suggested mapping as one of the Digital Humanities method to disentangle archives from rigidity, structured systems, omission, and the dangers of random selection and institutional norms, to reimagine questions of ownership and agency in relation to our past.